Category Archives: Writing Parent

I changed my blog header image. Whoopty-do, right? I’ve seen that theme-provided header of leather-bound books in, like. four blogs this week and I realized that it doesn’t say much for my creativity, does it? This picture is from my honeymoon. My husband and I went on a wildlife tour of Yellowstone National Park – way more romantic than it sounds to a couple of science geeks. Yes, I found the perfect man in that he was not just OK with this as a honeymoon, he was actually really excited about it. I do love my darling little geek.

So this picture is of a tiny tributary on the Snake River, on which we took an impromptu raft trip with our tour group. What a great and inspiring place. Seriously. It was so beautiful and serene and full of amazing ecology. And what impacts me now as I remember it is how well the serenity masked the riot of life-or-death activity that lay beneath that sparkling water. To my city-attuned ears there was almost no noise in those glades and we held our breath as we watched deer graze in the silence. But I knew intellectually that there was danger in every movement for those “cute” little animals we watched through our spotting scopes. There were wolves and bears and moose, not to mention the bacteria and microorganisms lurking in that hyper-mineralized water. And immediate threats aside, those sweet little deer have to face extreme climates, poaching, habitat encroachment, tourism, starvation… But their adaptations are wild. No pun intended. They have these hard little hooves that allow them to walk in super-heated water because the hot springs of Yellowstone have vegetation for them to eat in the dead of winter. You can actually see their tracks in the algae mats of the hot springs.

So my forced metaphor of the day is that I need to adapt to my extreme environment and find time to write. It’s hazardous in here with a hyper (almost) 4 year old and a newly crawling baby. In fact, as I type the baby is trying to rip the screen off my laptop and the kid is threatening me with a green plastic toy soldier she found in our back yard. So what survival traits can I evolve to survive them as a writer? And how uncomfortable will that evolution be?